Somewhere early in that span, all sense of myself as a writer — this thing that had been a core identifier almost my entire life — slipped away.

Lately I’ve started to feel as though I’m channeling some sort of inner George R.R. Martin. That might have once been a good thing. Now, though? Just the opposite.

Sometimes there are years that we’re grimly happy to see drop off the calendar and land in the mud as we slog on, trample them under, and leave them behind.

Everything we most enjoy doing is done a finite number of times, and, whether or not we realize it in the moment, one of them will be the last.